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Lindsey Graham, This Year’s Maverick

Graham in his Senate office. His bipartisanship on divisive issues has made him a pariah among some Republicans.Credit
Michele Asselin for The New York Times

Lindsey Graham was sitting in a sedan early one morning and contentedly discussing the various fellow South Carolina conservatives who dislike him — Tea Partiers, Constitutionalists, immigration hardliners — when Van Cato, his upstate regional director, lifted a hand from the steering wheel and said: “That’s the leader of them right there. There’s his sign. He’s running for Greenville County Council.”

“Harry Kibler,” Graham, the state’s senior U.S. senator, murmured as he read the campaign poster.

“He’s the one that has that prop of your legs sticking out of a toilet in the back of his truck,” Cato added helpfully.

Graham turned away from the window. A large red flea bite, acquired during a recent trip to Afghanistan, sat aglow just to the right of his nose. “Is he running as a Republican?” he asked. Cato affirmed that Kibler was.

Graham is not a morning person, but at that hour in May he was thoroughly revved up, despite eating only a pack of crackers for breakfast. (Graham does not cook; it is widely believed by those close to him that he is incapable of manipulating a coffee machine, an oven, a toaster or a can opener.) Big issues rattle from his brain and out of his inert, somewhat glassy-eyed face as if dispensed by a gum-ball machine. Among these was the Kerry-Lieberman climate-change bill — or “energy independence” bill, as he preferred to call it for the sake of attracting conservative support. (“To me, it is about jobs, not polar bears!”) After attending 183 meetings and devoting more than 120 hours of scheduled Senate time to the matter, Graham dropped his co-sponsorship of the legislation when the Senate majority leader, the Democrat Harry Reid, disclosed in late April that his priority would be passage of an immigration bill. (Reid later reversed his decision.) Graham promptly called Reid on the phone and accused him of shifting the legislative calendar to woo Hispanic voters in Reid’s uphill re-election struggle, and then, according to Graham, the two exchanged “a few F-bombs” before hanging up.

In Graham’s view, the visceral nature of immigration politics combined with the BP oil spill fouled the waters for debate on a comprehensive energy bill — “a huge lift in good circumstances,” he told me in May. Still, in June, he added his name to the more modest energy bill of Senator Richard Lugar, another Republican, and expressed hope that it might attract “Democrats and Republicans alike.”

In years past, Graham’s deal-making forays typically featured his close friend, Senator John McCain of Arizona, as the frontman. Nowadays McCain has shucked his maverick ways in order to court his state’s G.O.P. primary voters, while Graham’s reflexive displays of bipartisanship have made him something of a scourge among South Carolina Tea Partiers. Harry Kibler fingered Graham as major prey in Kibler’s “RINO hunt” (Republicans in Name Only). The South Carolina chapter of Resist.net warns constituents that Graham “is up to his old reach-across-the-aisle tricks again!” Among the conservative activists who have called for censuring Graham as a quisling of the right is the state’s G.O.P. gubernatorial nominee and Tea Party favorite, Nikki Haley.

“Everything I’m doing now in terms of talking about climate, talking about immigration, talking about Gitmo is completely opposite of where the Tea Party movement’s at,” Graham said as Cato drove him to the city of Greenwood, where he was to give a commencement address at Lander University later that morning. On four occasions, Graham met with Tea Party groups. The first, in his Senate office, was “very, very contentious,” he recalled. During a later meeting, in Charleston, Graham said he challenged them: “ ‘What do you want to do? You take back your country — and do what with it?’ . . . Everybody went from being kind of hostile to just dead silent.”

In a previous conversation, Graham told me: “The problem with the Tea Party, I think it’s just unsustainable because they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country. It will die out.” Now he said, in a tone of casual lament: “We don’t have a lot of Reagan-type leaders in our party. Remember Ronald Reagan Democrats? I want a Republican that can attract Democrats.” Chortling, he added, “Ronald Reagan would have a hard time getting elected as a Republican today.”

Graham is now accustomed to sporadic heckling and the occasional icy stare in his native state, where he was re-elected to a second term in 2008 by a 15-point margin. His give-and-take brand of conservatism has never been an obvious fit in bloodred South Carolina, and even more so during the past Tea-Party-agitated year. Today, however, he faced no overt displays of hostility on the Lander campus. Just before taking the stage, he donned a graduation gown but winced at the other accouterment and said: “Do we have to wear these stupid hats? I’ve got the smallest head.”

A few minutes later, Graham stood behind the lectern, the lone hatless person onstage. “To the graduates: I’m from the federal government, and I’m here to help you,” he deadpanned to laughter. After tossing out a few if-I-can-make-it-anyone-can references to his humble beginnings as a pool-hall owner’s son in Central, S.C., and his 800 combined SAT score, the senator fell into his message du jour: “This country is being challenged in a tremendous way. Broken borders, 12 million people here illegally. Everybody’s upset about that — they ought to be. But somebody’s got to fix it. . . . America’s at her best when she’s thinking about the future and not the moment. So my advice to you graduates is when you get out of school and get a job and a family, try to be part of the solution, not the problem. . . . And the only way we’re going to solve these problems is working together.”

The words — a politician’s boilerplate applause lines in any previous era — had a quaint, almost beseeching ring to them, all the more so when the audience responded with silence. The senator kept the speech to a brisk 11 minutes, concluding with a well-received “Good luck, and I hope all of y’all become rich!”

On the hourlong drive back to his house in Seneca, where he was born nearly 55 years ago, Graham brooded restlessly. The clashing passions on immigration particularly worried him. He feared riots were imminent. “I’ve got to find some way to let some steam out,” he said. “Find a safety valve. You know what I mean? I’ve been thinking about that all morning.”

The White House logs do not record visits paid by U.S. senators. According to his office’s records, however, Lindsey Graham has been to the West Wing 19 times since Barack Obama became president. When I asked the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, if any other Republican senator was so frequent a guest, he thought for a moment before responding, rather doubtfully, “Maybe Susan Collins.”

Emanuel went on to say: “He’s willing to work on more things than the others. Lindsey, to his credit, has a small-government vision that’s out of fashion with his party, which stands for no government. . . . He’s one of the last big voices to give that vision intellectual energy.”

While the energy of Graham’s intellect is hard to dispute, the nature of his “vision” is another matter. As his press office never tires of pointing out, the American Conservative Union awarded Graham a lifetime rating of 90. The antitax Club for Growth views Graham less heroically, ranking him dead last among Republican senators and below 12 Democrats and independents.

Still, such benchmarks seem as bygone as clap-o-meters and mood rings in a day when conservatives will savage one of their own for having the effrontery to characterize the president of the United States as “a good role model” or “an American just as much as anybody else.” Graham made both comments on “Meet the Press” in March. His greater transgression, however, has been his willingness — even eagerness — to seek common ground with Democrats. For his sins, Glenn Beck termed the senator Obama Lite, while Rush Limbaugh labeled him Lindsey Grahamnesty. Less tame are the blogosphere monikers, like “Miss Lindsey,” that play off of Graham’s never-married status. During a South Carolina Tea Party rally this spring, one speaker created an uproar by postulating that Graham supported a guest-worker program out of fear that the Democrats might otherwise expose his homosexuality. (Graham smirked when I brought this up. “Like maybe I’m having a clandestine affair with Ricky Martin,” he said. “I know it’s really gonna upset a lot of gay men — I’m sure hundreds of ’em are gonna be jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge — but I ain’t available. I ain’t gay. Sorry.”)

Graham feels a strong personal connection to a handful of issues. Saving Social Security from financial collapse by reforming its benefit structure is one: as a college student, he and his teenage sister depended on their recently deceased parents’ Social Security benefits. Additionally, devising a framework for where and how to adjudicate cases of suspected terrorism has natural appeal to Graham, who as a judge advocate general has served as a military lawyer for the past 25 years. Otherwise, it’s a mix of intellectual curiosity, statesmanship, opportunism and maybe even loneliness that compels Lindsey Graham — who admits, “I don’t have a life” — to thrust himself into the innermost core of American policy making.

According to his friend and fellow Republican senator, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia: “Without fail, he’ll ask me every January or February: ‘O.K., what are you going to do this year? What do you want to get done?’ And I’m just trying to keep my head above water. But Lindsey’s thinking ahead — he’s got an agenda.”

“I think I’m where senators used to be,” Graham said one evening at a German restaurant on Capitol Hill. “I think I’m where they were before 24/7 news. It gets a little old after a while trying to explain yourself. I don’t think I’m overly complicated. I’m unique, but I’m not complicated.”

The senator — who stripped off his jacket and tie even before sitting down — leaned over his potato pancake, and his customarily glazed eyes widened just a bit. “My God, look what I’m involved in!” he said. “By default, if for no other reason. How do you close Gitmo without working with me now? How do you do immigration?” He added: “What if I walked away from climate change tomorrow? . . . You know, all politicians like to be thought of in their own mind as somebody special. I’m past that now. I’m a little worried. This is not healthy for the country. It’s really not.”

Graham did not seem terribly shook up about it, to be honest. A few days earlier, he told me that his party’s unwillingness to work with the Obama administration amounted to an “opportunity” for him to be the Hill’s deal-maker in chief, adding with a laugh, “I mean, I’m not having to push through people to get to the front of the line.”

Photo

LOYALISTS Graham with John McCain during the 2008 campaign. Once McCain's legislative “wingman,” Graham has become the Republican most likely to try to hammer out a deal.Credit
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

I observed that if this conversation about how to resolve tough issues were taking place in 2006, I would likely be having it not with Graham but with his friend and legislative mentor, John McCain. “Totally agree,” he responded. “I mean, I was the wingman, O.K.?” But, he acknowledged, things are different now: “John’s got a primary. He’s got to focus on getting re-elected. I don’t want my friend to get beat.”

I asked whether he was giving McCain a pass on anything risky this year.

“Yeah,” he said. Graham added that he was thinking about a question I recently asked him: would he be so out there, in a bipartisan way, if he were facing re-election this year rather than four years from now? “The answer’s probably no.” Then, as a point of pride, Graham could not resist observing that he had remained committed to immigration reform, which would include some form of a path to citizenship for those illegally in the country, during his previous (admittedly easy) re-election quest. “So I can go to these guys” — meaning, Republicans up for re-election this year — “and say: ‘Listen, I know you’re in the cycle, but so was I. I’m still here.’ ”

McCain was one of “these guys” who was ignoring Graham’s advice. Though Graham did not explicitly say so, he clearly seemed disappointed in his friend’s election-year drift to the right. He did, however, point out a bright side: McCain’s protégé now had an opportunity to show off his own legislative chops. And when it came to shaping the debate, Graham said: “I think I do that better than John. You know, he’s always been a romantic. He’s got to be fighting the bad guys. I’ve never been a Luke Skywalker. I’m a much more calculating guy than that. I understand that you just don’t charge into these things based on some moral belief that you’re right and the other guy’s wrong. I believe that you lay the groundwork before you get involved in these fights.”

It plainly delights Graham to be where the action is — and to let people know it. Yet he seems, for someone so savvy and influential, to lack even the most remedial measure of sophistication. His culinary weaknesses tend toward Chick-fil-A, except when dieting, and sweetish alcoholic beverages like Baileys liqueur and (during our recent dinner) almond schnapps. The row house on Capitol Hill that Graham purchased in 1998 is sparsely adorned, says a friend, “with early college-reject furniture” that was in fact left behind by the previous owner. It took months for Graham to realize that someone had stolen a TV of his, since it was in his kitchen, which he never uses. Bachelorhood would appear to have chosen Lindsey Graham, rather than the other way around — though a former adviser once told me that during Graham’s early Congressional races, stricken-hearted women would show up to the campaign office bearing newly purchased ties and dress shirts for the candidate to wear.

The hyperlinked world leaves Graham utterly at sea. He has never owned a BlackBerry or an iPhone. His staff maintains a Facebook page and posts on Twitter on his behalf, but without Graham’s supervision. The one strand of modern science that rivets Lindsey Graham is the public-opinion poll. Since his first Congressional race in 1994, Graham has employed the services of the South Carolina political consultant Richard Quinn. Quinn’s surveys now find Graham’s approval rating among Republicans at 64, which is 13 points lower than South Carolina’s far more conservative junior senator, Jim DeMint, but still quite high given Graham’s periodic defections from the conservative movement. When Graham takes on an issue, his seemingly off-the-cuff musings reflect his knowledge of Quinn’s data.

Graham revealed his strategic reliance on public opinion over dinner when he brought up the subject of the Guantánamo Bay prison, a post-9/11 legacy of the Bush administration. Gen. David Petraeus convinced the senator that the prison had become an effective recruiting tool for terrorist organizations and therefore must be closed. But, Graham told me: “Eighty-eight percent of the Republican primary voters, when asked ‘Should you close Guantánamo Bay?’ in the poll we took, said no. Now, when you ask, ‘If military commanders said it would be in our national-security interest to close it, and you could do it safely,’ that gets you about 40 percent.” He added: “I believe that if I can get a legal system in place that will convince people that we’re not going to let these people roam loose in the United States, and that we will treat them as military threats, not common criminals — and if the military will stand by me in that process, and if I can get some Bush people saying, ‘This is the right thing to do,’ we can win the day. And I can turn the polling around to at least 50-50. And five years from now when we’ll be in a new stage of the war, this will be an enormous benefit.”

The senator permitted himself a sip of almond schnapps. “Reason always prevails,” he drawled, “if you can market it right.”

There was a time, barely more than a decade ago, when Lindsey Graham was a darling of the right wing — a Newt Gingrich acolyte who in 1994 delivered to the Republicans a House seat that was occupied by a Democrat since 1877; who at one moment was an unremarkable Huck Finn look-alike seated at an overflow table beside the House Judiciary Committee dais next to Sonny Bono’s widow, Mary, and then a moment later burst out of his cocoon during the Clinton impeachment hearings with that rhetorical gem, “Is this Peyton Place or Watergate?” Four years later in 2002, he easily won election to the Senate seat that was occupied by Strom Thurmond for the previous 48 years.

But just as Thurmond could himself defy orthodoxy now and then, Graham signaled his waywardness early on. Dis­illusioned by Gingrich’s infidelities to his own Contract With America, Graham joined several others in an attempted coup against Gingrich, who was then speaker of the House. His memorable zingers against Clinton notwithstanding, Graham was the only Republican member of the Judiciary Committee to vote against any of the impeachment articles (the one relating to whether the president perjured himself in the Paula Jones case).

Graham once told me that he was fascinated by “people who can handle fear and do brave, difficult things.” He was referring to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — “If you wanted to have a Martin Luther King Month, it would be fine with me” — but could just as easily have been talking about McCain, a former P.O.W. Their friendship grew out of McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, when Congressman Graham threw his support behind McCain during the ugly South Carolina primary, and defiantly stuck with him even after his state went for George W. Bush. As a newly elected senator, Graham relied on McCain to show him the ropes. His foreign policy and immigration positions were soon indistinguishable from those of his mentor.

By the 2008 campaign, the two were inseparable. Graham found a role as the court jester who kept things light even when there seemed little to laugh about. He remained by the candidate’s side on election night. The following day, Graham stayed with the McCains at their ranch outside Sedona, Ariz.

A month later, Graham flew with McCain to the Chicago campaign headquarters of President-elect Obama to discuss issues like immigration and detainee policy and how the two of them might be able to work with the new administration. Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was there. Graham and Emanuel each served as their candidates’ negotiators for the presidential debates, and Graham recalled: “We were able to knock this thing out pretty quickly. And I really respected him because if he told me he’d do something, he would.” That day in Chicago, according to both men, Emanuel pulled Graham aside and expressed admiration for how he had stuck by his friend, especially during the bleakest moments. It became immediately apparent that the White House chief of staff and Graham would be doing business, with or without McCain.

Whenever Graham speaks fondly of other legislators, Ted Kennedy’s name invariably comes up. He admired the Massachusetts senator’s energy and passion, but above all his practicality. According to Graham, Kennedy claimed that, while working behind the scenes to garner support from fellow senators across the aisle, he would publicly lambaste the same Republicans for one reason or another, so that back home they would not be tarred as bedfellows of the liberal icon.

A similar element of kabuki theater attends Graham’s relationship with the Obama administration. “The president has said very nice things about me off the record to other reporters,” Graham recently told me, and a senior administration official confirmed that the White House places particularly high value on Graham.

Certain elements of Graham’s dance routine with the White House are available for public viewing. Graham has already signaled that he would be receptive to confirming Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court this summer. First, however, he will extract his pound of flesh. “I want to make the case that she’s a liberal,” he told me. “Part of this whole exercise is to say to the public that if you want liberal judges, fine — vote for a liberal candidate for president. If the policy Harvard had toward military recruitment upsets you, you need to understand that liberals think that way.”

On other matters, Graham has unabashedly supported the Obama administration. He credits the president for his attentiveness to Pakistan, for sending more troops to Afghanistan and for recently declaring a moratorium on deep-water drilling while remaining open to future domestic oil exploration. These, of course, are among the issues on which Obama has disappointed his liberal supporters. I asked Graham if he felt that he had taken the full measure of the president. “No, I don’t,” he said. “I got comfortable with Bush. I’m not comfortable with Obama.”

Graham professes a wariness of Obama that goes back to the comprehensive immigration-reform bill in 2007. Late in the game, Obama, who was still in the Senate, offered a seemingly innocuous amendment that would shorten the expiration period of merit-based visa evaluations. To Graham, it appeared that presidential candidate Obama was doing the bidding of the trade unions and that the move would collapse the bill’s fragile coalition. Graham exploded on the Senate floor, saying: “This is why we can’t work together. Because some people, when it comes to the tough decisions, back away.” The amendment failed, but Graham nonetheless came away convinced, as he would tell me, that Obama “folded like a cheap suit.”

Still, Obama’s performance in 2008 left Graham impressed — “I thought this guy did a masterful job of beating Clinton, feinting to the left, coming back to the middle” — and hopeful that the new president would depart from the intransigence of the previous one. (“Bush made it hard for anybody to work with him,” Graham told me.) In Chicago, Obama and Graham agreed to stay in touch about the matter of detained suspected terrorists. Graham was therefore chagrined to read a couple of weeks later that Obama intended to close the Guantánamo Bay prison without having first established an alternative facility. Graham recalls telling Rahm Emanuel: “This is a mistake. You need to get people on board for why you should close it.”

Graham has pressed the administration to deny accused terrorists the right to file habeas corpus petitions and to establish military tribunals for the most dangerous suspects. He fought Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man suspected of masterminding the 9/11 attacks, in a Manhattan federal courthouse. In January, opposition from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and others led Holder to rethink his position. Shortly after that occurred, Graham made a visit to the West Wing. Emanuel escorted him into the Oval Office. Obama told Graham that the decision of whether to try Mohammed in a civilian courtroom or before a military commission “was always 51-49” — a close call.

“Mr. President, I understand where you’re coming from intellectually,” Graham said he replied. But, he added, public support for a civilian trial on domestic soil was “just not there.”

“You’re probably right,” Obama conceded.

After recalling this conversation for me, I asked Graham if he appreciated that level of dispassion from the president. “Yeah,” he said. “I totally do. I think that’s the right way to be.” I commented on the temperamental difference between Obama and George W. Bush. “Yeah,” Graham said. “I find it almost reassuring.”

Two weeks ago, I found Graham in his office contemplating a coming scheduled visit to the White House to explore potential areas of agreement on energy and climate legislation. To him, consensus building is a game of inches, and the meeting (which was later postponed) would likely amount to no more and no less than a positive increment. “I fully understand 70 to 80 percent of my [Republican] conference is going to reject any idea of putting a price on carbon anywhere,” he told me. For that matter, he said, “the environmental groups are great to deal with — but they think the planet’s gonna melt in five years. I don’t. I think carbon pollution, all things considered, is bad for human beings. But it’s not what I think of when I wake up in the morning. . . . I offer myself as a bridge, and I take a beating for that, and I get rewarded for that. It’s a business. Politically, it is who I am now. There’s no use for me to try to play another game.”

But what if no one else is playing? So far, Lindsey Graham’s seven years as a senator and frequent White House visitor have failed to produce a major legislative triumph. Graham himself acknowledged to me that there will be no deals consummated on energy or immigration this year — nor, perhaps, in 2011 or 2012. Is there any reason to believe things might improve further down the line? Evan Bayh, a Senator from Indiana and, like Graham, a consensusbuilder, apparently didn’t think so, having chosen not to seek re-election this year on the grounds that Congress had become “too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving.”

When I brought up Bayh’s words, Graham acknowledged that “absolutely, I have moments where I say, ‘How do we get from here to there?’ ” But this was tactical rather than existential angst. Graham’s political cunning may not in the end produce a lasting legacy, but as high-wire theater it rivals the parallel antics of his denouncers on the far right. “If you look at the Republicans who are likely to come into the Senate in 2010,” he said during our last meeting, “they’re gonna be more like me, not less like me.”

Catching himself, he added with a toothy grin, “Now, this lady from Nevada?” — referring to Sharron Angle, the Tea Party’s Republican favorite who will face Harry Reid in November. “Probably not.”

Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of “Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 4, 2010, on page MM22 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: This Year’s Maverick. Today's Paper|Subscribe